Yiddish Flavor

In ‘Rhapsody in Schmaltz,’ Michael Wex delves into Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine and the stories behind classic dishes—from kugel to cholent to brain latkes. (Yes, brain latkes.)

By Leah Koenig for Tablet Magazine

Michael Wex is not a chef. He’s not a lifelong challah baker, an avid cookbook collector, or even, by his own admission, much of a home cook. But his new book, Rhapsody in Schmaltz: Yiddish Food and Why We Can’t Stop Eating It, might just be the most important Jewish food book published this year.

As a novelist and author of Born to Kvetch, a New York Times best-selling book on Yiddish language and culture, Wex has established himself as one of the field’s few public intellectuals—the Malcolm Gladwell of the Yiddish world, minus the controversy. In Rhapsody in Schmaltz, he turns his attention to food, specifically the nostalgic brand of cooking served forth from the hardscrabble kitchens of Eastern Europe.

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Making Grandma’s charoset (or how I learned to love Passover)

By Edgar M. Bronfman for JTA

When I walked into the house through the back door one day as a young man, I was shocked to see my mother in the kitchen. To put it mildly, this was not one of her favorite places. When I asked her why she was there, a look of panic crossed her face.

“Now that Grandma’s gone,” she explained, “I have to make the charoset.”

Sensing her culinary discomfort, I volunteered to take over.

With a look of vast relief, she fled the scene. Guided by the memory of my grandmother’s charoset — the sweet, chunky, fruity mixture that symbolizes the mortar used by the Hebrew slaves to build Egypt’s real estate — I chopped up apples and walnuts and added raisins.

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Why Bashing the Halakhic Prenup Destroys More Than It Builds

by Keshet Starr and Rabbi Jeremy Stern for The Jewish Daily Forward   

Any suggestion to help resolve the plight of agunot , or “chained women,” whose husbands won’t grant them a religious divorce, must be taken seriously. So we read Shayna Zamkanei’s article with great interest.

Zamkanei argues that the Halakhic Prenuptial Agreement (also known as “the Prenup”) does not work and she proposes what she sees as a real solution to the agunah crisis. She is wrong on both counts. Fortunately, while her proposed solution fails, the Prenup does not.

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Why there are Muslim ghettos in Belgium, but not in the US

By Jeff Jacoby, The Boston Globe
LONG BEFORE TUESDAY’S terror attacks in Brussels, it was clear that Belgium had become a breeding ground for Islamist extremists. Hundreds of Belgian Muslims — as many as 500, according to one estimate — have gone to Syria and Iraq to fight for ISIS, making Belgium by far Europe’s leading supplier of foreign jihadists. Last November’s horrific slaughter in Paris was masterminded by a Belgian radical, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, and at least four of the men who carried out those attacks were from the Brussels district of Molenbeek. One of them was Salah Abdeslam, who was captured in Molenbeek, after an intense manhunt, on March 19.

For Islamist imams and terrorist ringleaders, such neighborhoods — heavily Muslim, densely populated, with high unemployment and crime rates — have proved fertile territory for recruiting violent jihadists. “There is almost always a link with Molenbeek. That’s a gigantic problem, of course,” Belgium’s prime minister said after the Paris atrocities.

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